Hello all,

I've also been reading online, lurking, trying to educate myself about DAE and audio compression. My particular interest is three-fold: 1) To archive, organize, break into tracks the twenty monoral cassette tapes of live band/audience music that I've been recording with permission each year, 2) To archive my own small CD collection, mostly of contemorary Christian music, to be able to play songs and read info in my RCA MP3 player, 3) To archive our small collection of 33 1/3 LPs, most irreplaceable, some recorded by friends of mine.

I successfully ripped a CD, using EAC with LAME. On my HD the compression was about 7 or 8 to 1. However, when I burned a CD, it didn't appear to be compressed at all. And it doesn't play in a standard CD player.

My system is small and old: HP Pavilion 6330, Pentium III 300mhz, with Windows 98, 3.7GB HD, 48MB RAM upgraded to 382MB, with an original GoldStar CRD-8240B and an added Pacific Digital RapidWriter (16X Intenal IDE), unfortunately with cache.

I'd appreciate any general advice, and will be posting more specific information/questions. Thanks in advance.

Lewis

your mission:

1. decide on which audio editing software to use [cool edit pro, wavelab, etc.]

2. convert your tapes/records to wave files through your soundcard.

3. rip your CDs to wave files with EAC.

4. decide on which lossy compression format to use, i would recommend musepack or psytel aac.

...for musepack you could use: "--insane --minSMR 0"
...for psytel aac you could use: "-archive"

4.5 get a cd burner [dvd burner?] if you don't already have one and buy a pack of CDRs, the best of the more popular brands are fuji and sony [ty]...i would get 80min 700mb cds and get DATA not AUDIO.

5. for an archive setting, about 2 megs per minute is about average...when you have 700mb burn to CD for storage.

6. send me lots of money...

7. don't know my address inherently? i will send it! i am that much of a nice guy...

8. repeat...

later
mike

Also (partially) removing tape hiss could be useful in your case. It will be very time consuming however given your hardware setup.

that is what the audio editing software is for...number 1

Thanks, xmix and hanky.

Can the software you suggested be played on my MP3 player?
Can they work together with either EAC or LAME?
Do they require me to spend any more money on soft/hardware?
I'm really interested in something simple but effective, without bells and whistles beyond what I'll use.

Let's see, I'll use a monoral line-in feed, double the channels, take out a reasonable amount of tape hiss without affecting the ambience of live music with a real audience participating.
Once I record the WAV file to my HD, I'll need to manually create a cue sheet and (maybe) split the WAV file using that cue sheet. At some point I'll want to manually add tags, then go on to the steps of compression (MP3) and recording on CDR. I'll set the process going and do the time-consuming parts while I'm gone or asleep. Any help on settings and the optimal order to take these steps, I'd appreciate.

Lewis

Hi lcav and welcome.

Hmm, I'm sure you will get the same response in general forum as in mp3-forum, so I deleted the mp3-forum cross-post thread.

Sorry. But cross-posting makes things even harder to follow for other people, especially if both threads continue. Hope you understand.

[edit]I moved the thread to Mp3 forum, and left a redirect to the general forum. Hope this is ok to you.